PUT on your couch potato walking shoes and tag along as David Hartman and Barry Lewis take a 17-mile “Walk Up Broadway,” pointing out points of historical, architectural and gossipy interest along the way.

Keep your hand on your wallet. It’s begging time for public broadcasting.

But we’d rather see Ch.13 holding up “A Walk” as the sort of television that wouldn’t be done if it didn’t do it than specials featuring get-rich gurus and performances we know all too well.

Lewis is the tour guide and font of an amazing array of information. Hartman is the celebrity lending his name to the project, which begins where Broadway began hundreds of years ago: At the southern-most tip of Manhattan.

Where the Algonquin Indians had established a trading spot, the Dutch would establish a fort that Lewis says was such a joke it “belonged on Comedy Central.”

From Bowling Green and the Customs House, a majestic setting for all-important trade, Lewis and Hartman will wander north, but not before pointing out a metal fence that dates back to English colonial days.

It’s minus the symbols of royalty that were ripped off by revolutionaries who pragmatically left the fence otherwise intact.

“It may have been a revolution,” says Lewis, “but we didn’t want to get carried away. You know, we’re not French.”

The program’s path take sHartman and Lewis past the 7,000-lb. bull that has become a tourist photo stop since it was deposited, unsolicited and rather unwelcome, by artist Arturo Di Modica; the Woolworth Building, which marked the beginning of the skyscraper era in New York; and the African Burial Ground, where perhaps 20,000 enslaved and freed people were buried.

Lewis explains how residential, theatrical and business districts moved north in spurts, showing us an early department store built of prefab iron work treated with faux finishes at Broome Street, and showing us at Bleecker Street the location of Pfaff’s subterranean restaurant, where Walt Whitman and his bohemian circles hung out.

At 23rd Street, where the wind would whip around off the Flatiron Building, we see archival film that illustrates the origin of the phrase 23-Skiddoo.

We wander through familiar territory of Times Square and push northward to ever hapless Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, the Ansonia apartments – a repository of all sorts of history and gossip, only a little of which is shared – and the palatial Central Savings Bank.

By the time we’ve been steered past Straus Park at 106th Street and its reminder of a real Titanic love story, we’re feeling a bit rushed through Harlem and into Washington Heights, where Lewis takes us inside the old Loews movie palace that was reopened as a house of worship.

Its decor, Lewis sums up as “Mayan-Aztec-Uzbeckistani-Deco.”

As with a tour like this, which winds through the Cloisters and ends at the Harlem River, only Lewis could do it.